Successful entrepreneurs know what it’s like to do everything and be responsible for everything.

Startup life is never dull, but it requires hard work and commitment.

Most of them started out small, maybe in a home office or small storefront, and they spent those first weeks and months fulfilling every role from clerk to purchasing officer to custodian. They know what it’s like when business suddenly picks up, necessitating long, draining hours. And they know what it’s like when things are slow and they second-guess every decision.

Entrepreneurs are visionaries. And CEOs are too. But there are key differences between the two roles, and at some point, it’s necessary to shift from the startup mindset to treating the business as a thriving, growing, living entity.

You Can’t Do It All Indefinitely while Scaling Up

Of course, in many professional fields, it is possible to be a solo proprietor and to love it. Many solo entrepreneurs make a career out of law, accounting, tailoring, engineering, and many other professions. But the entrepreneur who envisions a business scaling up beyond what can be done in a backyard workshop or single-person office must realize that there will come a day when they can no longer fill all roles.

Differences Between Entrepreneur Mode and CEO Mode

There’s no singular “correct” time to make the transition from entrepreneur to CEO, but the need usually makes itself apparent. Some people choose to make the transition once they hire people to take care of tasks that they used to do themselves. Others may choose to go from startup mode to CEO mode when their business adds a second location.

The key is that as CEO, you spend less time in the proverbial weeds getting things done and more time stepping back and making strategic decisions. This requires having a trusted team in place to take care of day-to-day operations. When this happens, there are many benefits to making a graceful exit from entrepreneur mode.

Why You Must Let Go of Startup Mode

Becoming a leader is a bit like raising children. At some point, you must step back and trust that your team knows what to do.

By refusing to step back from the entrepreneurial role, you risk missing the big picture of how your business fits into its industry and community. And you risk micromanaging your staff and ultimately alienating them. It’s not easy at first to put your absolute trust in your team, but until then, you can’t gain the perspective you need to see how your business should grow and how to make it happen.

Executive coaching can help the entrepreneur who is having difficulty making the transition from doing to leading. In fact, executive coaches frequently work with clients who want to put their skills, talents, and experiences to work leading, but who don’t know how. If you know it’s time for you to change from being the startup founder of your business to being its CEO, executive coaching can help you make that change successfully.

You Can Hire a CEO if You’re Not Cut Out for the Role

Some entrepreneurs ultimately conclude that they’re not cut out for the CEO role, and that’s OK too. But that doesn’t mean the company doesn’t need one. Hiring a CEO is a big step, but for some entrepreneurs, it is the right one. In these cases too, executive coaching can be employed to bring the new CEO up to speed. Executive coaches in these situations will rely upon the wisdom and experience of the entrepreneur to help the new CEO develop appropriate goals that align with those of the company.

Both entrepreneurs and CEOs need vision, commitment, passion, and drive. But how they employ those characteristics differ. Your startup business won’t be a startup forever, and when the time comes for it to scale up appreciably, it’s also time for a CEO. Many entrepreneurs make the transition to CEO with great finesse, but for many, it doesn’t come naturally. In those cases, executive coaching can help.

Great companies require great leadership, and the nature of that leadership changes depending on many factors, including how new or old the company is, and its long-term goals. I invite you to learn more about leadership coaching, however new or established your business is. Strong executive leadership can be the difference between a company that struggles and one that soars.

Leadership training programs routinely emphasize the importance of integrity and trust between leaders and those they lead.

Trust is the spark and integrity is the fuel in the engine of team productivity.

Integrity is a trait that’s hard to define, but not hard to recognize. It is a way of demonstrating wholeness and soundness. When people see integrity, they are drawn to it, and when they see it in leaders, they are more likely to follow them.

Trust is closely related to integrity because both trust and integrity indicate that you believe someone can be relied upon. You can rely upon them to be who they say they are, to demonstrate what they say they believe, and to relieve others of the burden of wondering whether they are honorable. And two of the best ways of demonstrating integrity and trustworthiness are practicing empathy and setting a good example.

Empathy: The “Soft” Skill Most People Acquire the Hard Way

It’s unfortunate that empathy is classified as a “soft” skill, not because soft skills are somehow inferior to “hard” skills, but because developing empathy usually requires dealing with hardship in some form. The word empathy comes from root words meaning “in” and “feeling.” Having empathy means you can figuratively put yourself in another’s shoes and understand why they feel the way they do.

A 2018 study by researchers at Texas A&M University found that empathetic leadership improves follower behavior and performance. Talking to a leader who appears to have no understanding of where you’re coming from (and no desire to understand) is demoralizing and tears down trust. And without trust, leadership falls flat.

Consistently Setting an Example Cultivates Trust

Setting a good example also builds trust and strengthens the bond between leaders and followers. Few things destroy trust faster than seeing someone you admire doing something they say is wrong, or that they won’t tolerate. It opens up all sorts of questions about what else they may be deceptive about.

Researchers studied the specific example of “cyberloafing,” or goofing off online during work hours. Specifically, in workplaces where cyberloafing was frowned-upon, how leaders behaved had a significant influence on how rank-and-file workers behaved. In other words, when leaders engaged in cyberloafing, everyone else was likely to do the same.

When leaders goof off at work, everyone else feels empowered to do so.

While cyberloafing can be a minor infraction, the effect of example on this behavior leads to questions of the importance of example in other behaviors. Actively demonstrating values through behavior may be a “quieter” form of leadership, but the effects speak loudly and clearly.

Empathy and Example Humanize Leadership

Empathy and example show that leaders are human beings and not just people who have obtained an impressive job title. Leadership coaching often involves working on behaviors that humanize leaders to those who report to them, so that trust and loyalty grow. And leadership development programs that neglect the value of empathy and example let participants down because leadership devoid of empathy and example is hollow.

Whether or not you have a job title associated with leadership, you owe it to those you work with as colleagues, those you supervise, and those you report to, to demonstrate empathy and set an example through your actions. The strongest organizations share bonds built on trust, which is something that takes time to build. Empathy and a strong example are two essential building blocks.

Excellent leadership coaching is never about shortcuts, or about “looking like” a leader so people will follow. It’s about doing the actual work required so that people are inspired to follow. Ultimately you can’t fake fundamental values like empathy and trustworthiness, and those who do eventually see how flimsy and fragile unearned trust is.

Workplace diversity means the inclusion of people from a range of backgrounds, of different ages, races, genders, and nationalities. It also means the inclusion of people with disabilities.

As the workforce becomes more inclusive, leadership must reflect diversity in leader choice and in leadership practices.

Tangible and intangible benefits come from a workforce that is diverse. It only makes sense that a diverse workforce allows employers to offer more solutions to customers, because of the range of ideas and practices contained within the company.

Creativity is enhanced when the workforce comes from different backgrounds and life experiences. Teams that are heterogeneous promote greater “cross-fertilization” of ideas because not everyone is coming from the same real or metaphorical place. And, of course, good job candidates are drawn to companies with diverse workforces because it indicates a lower chance of experiencing employment discrimination.

Leadership That Reflects the Workforce

Team members naturally want to see company leaders that are representative of the workforce. They want to see people of their gender, age, ethnicity, and educational background represented in leadership. That’s one of the main reasons why businesses must make leadership development programs available to people who show leadership potential and drive, regardless of whether they fit into conventional ideas of what leaders “look like.”

As companies diversify their leadership, they often find leadership coaching beneficial. Learning to lead alongside people of various backgrounds may require rethinking old attitudes, learning new skills, and understanding effective communication better – tasks that leadership coaches are uniquely well-equipped to address.

Characteristics That Transcend Demographics Matter Most

A 2018 study by Barry Posner of Santa Clara University found that while people attach importance to leadership that reflects their demographic characteristics, more important were underlying leadership characteristics including honesty, competence, inspiration, and a forward-looking attitude.

The good news is that those leadership characteristics aren’t limited to one demographic type. Businesses that have always (intentionally or not) looked for emerging leaders within a narrow range of demographic characteristics have every reason to expand their view of “leadership material” and offer leadership development programs accordingly.

Definitions of “leadership material” must be made based on current business reality rather than outdated notions.

Leadership Engagement Requires Key Leadership Characteristics

There are many different leadership styles, and how they are used should depend on something more than “how we’ve always done it.” Whether a workplace uses autocratic leadership, participative leadership, transformational leadership or some other leadership style should depend on factors including the size of the organization, what type of business it is, the prevailing work culture, and organizational goals.

Assuming that a business uses a leadership style (or a collection of leadership styles depending on its size and how it is organized) that is appropriate for the workforce and its goals, it will get the best leadership results when all leaders demonstrate honesty, transparency, fairness, and strong communication. Without these, leadership will not be as effective as it could be otherwise.

Leadership coaching works with leaders to identify skills gaps and leadership blind spots, as well as goals and objectives. The most successful leadership coaches are the ones who help leaders make the greatest positive difference in their leadership. Elevating leadership capability often requires that leaders work on key characteristics like honesty, transparency, fairness, and great communication, and leadership coaches have the tools and techniques that facilitate this.

There’s no question that trying to run a modern business based on leadership techniques that worked 50 years ago is short-sighted at best and dangerous at worst. Leadership development programs for today’s workforce cannot ignore the diversity in the workforce and in the surrounding world. Success requires both developing leaders who are representative of the people they lead and helping them develop the underlying characteristics of great leaders and teaching them how to put those characteristics to work.

If you’re interested in developing leadership in a changing workforce, I encourage you to check out my books. In particular, Intelligent Leadership: What You Need to Know to Unlock Your Full Potential is designed for leaders at all levels and addresses the many challenges they face in achieving and sustaining exceptional operating results.

The existence of surveillance at work and in many aspects of everyday life is hardly a surprise.

Most employees recognize the tremendous value of the data they handle on the job.

Young adults of today don’t remember a time before the internet, and people of all ages willingly hand over masses of personal data every day through their online interactions and social media participation. Most of these people realize that the social platforms they love are mining their content around the clock, creating amazingly detailed digital dossiers that are used primarily in the targeting of advertising.

So why is surveillance in the workplace such a sticky topic?

People want to be trusted inherently, and committed professionals may balk internally at the thought that their employers know exactly what they’re doing on company-issued devices. At the same time, data has become a tremendously valuable corporate asset, and breaches or leaks of data can be devastating.

Digital surveillance in the workplace is a reality, often for good reason. And it’s important that leaders understand its implications and their influence on whether employee monitoring delivers what it promises. In fact, leadership development programs that ignore digital employee monitoring and its effects are missing a key element of workplace operation – one that can cause major problems if ignored.

Leadership Transparency about Monitoring Is Paramount

Computer monitoring can take on the qualities of the “elephant in the room” that everyone ignores unless leaders are honest and transparent about its existence and the reasoning behind it. Conveniently ignoring the fact that a company uses employee monitoring may keep the open push-back to a minimum, but you can rest assured that the frontline employees talk about it and want answers.

It’s up to leadership to provide those answers, as uncomfortable as they might be. People may not be aware of how valuable the data they handle every day is, and they may see surveillance as just another method for leadership to make frontline workers stay in their lanes. By communicating what is being monitored and more importantly, why it is being monitored, leaders can prevent long-term problems with employee disengagement and hostility.

Being forthright and honest about monitoring, consequences, and enforcement can prevent long-term problems.

Fairness and Consistency of Enforcement Crucial

Equally important is that monitoring be used consistently and across the board. In other words, if the computer use of the entry-level engineer is monitored, then the computer use of the department head or vice president of technology’s computer use should be monitored too. Moreover, the consequences for breaching company policy should be applied with absolute fairness. Any other approach will kill morale and has the potential to drive away key employees that you dearly want to keep.

And the company’s entire approach to surveillance and monitoring should be reviewed periodically. You should monitor only the activity that warrants it, and inform all affected employees that you do so. For example, GPS tracking of company-issued laptops and phones makes sense because companies need to know where their property is, and tracking can be helpful in the event of theft. Employees need to know what is being monitored and why, and training sessions that spell it out clearly prevent misunderstandings and help employees understand why it is necessary.

Honesty about the Presence of Surveillance Is Non-Negotiable

Read any book, blog post, or article about leadership and you’ll see that honesty and transparency are two of the most important qualities leaders can have. In a business world where employee monitoring is often necessary to protect company property and company secrets, leaders must be prepared to communicate the fact that it’s taking place and why.

Leadership development programs and leadership coaching can help when companies want to proactively build understanding with employees about monitoring, and they can help when company leaders have mishandled the conversation about monitoring and want to remedy the situation. Any leadership development program worth its salt will emphasize honesty and transparency, and leadership coaching is frequently employed specifically for assisting leaders with their communication skills.

It’s not easy keeping pace with technological developments in the workplace, but it’s essential because of the effects they have on overall corporate culture. I invite you to check out my books, particularly Cultural Transformations: Lessons of Leadership and Corporate Reinvention. Excellent training, strong communication, and honesty up and down the corporate ladder have always been crucial to healthy and vibrant corporate culture, and the reality of workplace surveillance only makes those practices more important.

It may seem ironic that in a workplace experiencing ever-increasing digitization, it is the human qualities of leaders that appear to make the most difference.

Never underestimate the power of human connection in a digital workplace.

This is not to say that leaders don’t have to worry about learning new technologies, because everyone does. It means that the human element to leadership, the things that can’t be made into an algorithm, are if anything more important in the digital workplace than they were in pre-digital times.

There are many reasons for this. Before digitization, people were forced to interact with each other directly. Assignments for the typical desk worker arrived in their office mailbox or were verbally given during meetings rather than arriving via email or on digital calendars. The look on a supervisor’s face when they took the first look at a report or graph conveyed a lot about how well work was received.

Today’s teams are often geographically scattered and communicate electronically much of the time. Yet it’s still important to know there is an actual human overseeing things, and that clients have faces and names. In other words, leadership today requires having strong human-to-human skills – perhaps more than ever.

Resistance to Digitization Is Futile

Digitization won’t stop and trying to prevent it from encroaching on processes that have traditionally been manual only leads to problems. People are used to using digital technology around the clock, in their personal lives as well as at work, and insistence on manual or antiquated processes can lead to “shadow IT,” where employees use their own technology to get things done faster. While this can be a good thing, it can also be bad, particularly in terms of network security. Digitization and automation initiatives may receive some push-back from less technically-oriented employees, but avoiding digitization and automation ultimately leads to worse outcomes.

From “Command and Control” to “Influence”

Leadership coaching programs in the old days were predicated on a “command and control” leadership structure. Command and control may have a place in some leadership decisions, but the many startups that have exploded with growth in recent years indicate that leadership based on influence is more powerful in today’s workforce.

Strong communication skills, excellent emotional intelligence, and good critical thinking skills are emerging as the best leadership skills to have in an age of digital disruption, as newer titans like Google have found. Consequently, businesses must develop new leadership performance measures for work environments that are more collaborative, experimental, and risk-tolerant.

New performance measures may be needed to accommodate new leadership and work styles.

There is no “There” There

Leadership development programs today must not promote the idea that leadership ability is something you achieve and then possess for all time. As technology continues to evolve, so too will strong leaders continue to evolve. Obtaining a corner office and resting on laurels may have worked fifty years ago, but not today. Leadership in a digital world of business has no endpoint, and leaders must not pursue leadership thinking that once they reach a certain level that no further development will be required of them.

But while execution of leadership may be different today (and different again tomorrow), the fundamental qualities that all great leaders have to remain constant. A leader who has all the digital skills in the world, and who embraces technological change while forgetting about trustworthiness, transparency, honesty, and compassion won’t last.

It’s important that today’s leadership development programs differentiate between what is constant (like the aforementioned qualities) and what is changing (essentially everything else), and prepare leaders for roles where continuous learning and continual improvement of vital skills like communication are the norms.

The increasingly digital and automated workforce relies on the human nature of leadership perhaps more than ever. Teams may be physically scattered, and they may rely on computers, robotics, and artificial intelligence to be able to do their work, but that doesn’t mean they can be completely divorced from the humanity of the workplace.

The leaders who best understand this, who commit to maintaining the bedrock human characteristics of strong leaders while embracing technology, are the ones who are best positioned for long-term success – both for themselves and their organizations. I encourage you to learn more about my executive coaching and leadership training programs, which are based on both timeless leadership principles and commitment to continual improvement and learning.

If you’ve been in the workforce long enough, you have undoubtedly had a leader who was perceived like The Almighty: invisible and omnipotent.

The mysterious leader who is an unknown quantity due to a lack of communication can cause tremendous problems in the long term.

While there are probably people who dream of having a laissez-faire boss, the fact is, bosses who are cut off and uncommunicative are in many ways worse than bosses who regularly find fault, complain, and criticize. Leaders who are completely laissez-faire ultimately take value out of the organization (because they are often well compensated financially) without putting value into the organization. When all is said and done, people cannot follow someone they can’t see and don’t communicate with.

Connectedness Does Not Equal Communicativeness

There’s little excuse for avoiding communication since we have more communication technologies available than ever. But having the means of communication doesn’t mean that communication actually takes place. And communication is one of the most – some would say the most – important qualities a leader can have. What good are brilliant ideas if they go uncommunicated? How can team members improve and give their best efforts if they never receive feedback of any kind from their leaders?

Why Leaders Avoid Communicating

Perhaps the main reason some leaders avoid communicating is that they don’t have to. It’s easy for the non-communicative boss to fly under the radar. They may not receive the accolades that their more communicative peers do, but they don’t draw the criticism and scrutiny that leaders with more obvious shortcomings do.

In HR and at the very highest levels of leadership, there’s often plenty to take care of already, and a leader who is abusive or who makes bad decisions is the one those higher up will focus their attention on while the silent leader continues along, almost invisible.

Lack of Feedback Considered Worse than Critical Feedback

In the short term, a leader who is, say, a raging narcissist, can cause major stress for those under their leadership. But in the long term, the leader who doesn’t communicate does more damage. At least the leader who communicates dissatisfaction loudly is a known quantity. Who knows what to think about a leader who is sealed off and non-communicative? Being yelled at is tremendously stressful, of course, but it is the silent leader who degrades job satisfaction over the longest time period, according to a 2014 Norwegian study.

Training and Coaching Key to Developing Communication Skills

Training and coaching together are the keys to developing excellent communication skills.

Training in communication (which is not the same thing as training in presentation) is the key to overcoming the main problem of the uncommunicative boss. It should cover verbal and written communication and help people choose the right communication mode for the situation.

Perhaps more importantly, coaching, which involves practice of communication skills in realistic scenarios, is key. It’s one thing to know how to do something, but quite another to take that knowledge, turn it into a skill, and sharpen that skill to the point where it becomes second nature. In fact, executive coaches routinely work with executives whose communication skills need improvement.

Executive coaching frequently involves work on communication skills. Many leaders in particular hate being the bearer of bad news, even if it is constructive and will result in improvement. Executive coaches are able to not only help executives overcome communication problems, but also practice them to the point where knowing the right communication tactic for the situation becomes automatic.

Ineffective leadership comes in many forms, including leaders who are unnecessarily harsh and tactless, leaders who more concerned with being friendly with followers than actually leading them, and leaders who cruise along undetected because they don’t bother communicating with their followers.

Top-level leaders don’t need to go searching for trouble where none exists, but they must not forget about the leaders they never notice. It’s possible these leaders are doing their job splendidly and don’t seek out attention. But it’s also possible that they are absentee leaders who don’t think they need to practice strong communication now that they have an impressive job title.

If you’re interested in learning more about what strong leadership requires, I invite you to check out my books and read more about my executive coaching and leadership training services. In particular, Intelligent Leadership: What You Need to Know to Unlock Your Full Potential addresses good and bad leadership characteristics, what they mean, and how to strengthen assets while overcoming problems.

It’s safe to say that everyone wants to make their organization better in 2019. The two factors that will do the most to ensure this happens are leadership and organizational culture.

Strong leadership plus strong culture equals strong performance.

And really, there’s little point in addressing one without addressing the other, because the two are so closely intertwined. Leadership sets the tone and the pace, and leadership that fails to do so can’t complain when things don’t get better. Closing leadership gaps and striving to improve corporate culture in 2019 should be top priorities for organizations intent on making this year their best ever.

Closing Leadership Gaps

Leadership gaps are like gaps in a fence or hedge. Sure, most of the fence is still doing its job, but that gap can cause problems. Livestock could get out, or predators could get in, and they all have a way of finding those gaps and exploiting them. Likewise, people exploit leadership gaps, often to push their own agenda.

The ability to fill leadership gaps depends heavily on leadership development. Potential leaders should be identified long before they’re expected to fill a leadership role, and in the intervening time, leadership training programs can go a long way toward ensuring they develop the skills they will need. Sometimes leadership gaps are unexpected, and not having to scramble to fill a leadership position is like having the tools and materials ready to properly fix a gap in a fence: it’s done right the first time, so you can move forward with confidence.

Maintaining Strong Company Culture

A Deloitte study found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees consider corporate culture to be important to business success. And it’s no mystery why the companies listed on “Best Place to Work” rankings are generally highly successful. A strong, positive corporate culture makes recruiting employees (and leaders) easier, increases employee loyalty and engagement, promotes better collaboration and better performance, and keeps morale high.

When people look forward to coming to work, they’re likely to give their best efforts to keep it that way.

Improving organizational culture isn’t a one-time project, but something that must be tended to regularly, like a garden. Problems with culture don’t necessarily indicate that it’s time to scrap the current culture and start over, yet leaders should not hesitate to ask employees what they like and don’t like and how they think it could change. Likewise, frontline employees should not be afraid to speak up about elements of corporate culture they believe are harmful.

Leadership and Culture Interdependent

Excellent leadership is necessary for creating and maintaining a strong corporate culture, and strong corporate culture helps ensure strong leadership. Leadership coaching can be a key to empowering leaders to take an honest look at company culture and their role in it. The skills that leaders develop through leadership coaching – including communication skills, delegation skills, organizational skills, and decision-making skills – are precisely the ones needed to learn all about company culture as it is and to map out a plan to bring it to a higher level.

For better or worse, leadership and culture feed off each other. Bad leadership tends to reinforce bad cultural elements in a negative spiral, while good leadership tends to reinforce good cultural elements. For maximum company success measured across a range of indicators, you need both ingredients, just as you need both heat and seasoning to get the maximum flavor from a healthy, delicious meal.

With a brand new year stretching ahead of us, don’t just pay lip service to the concepts of culture and leadership. Learn your strong and weak points with each and make an actionable plan to improve both. You’ll not only make the workplace better for everyone, but you’ll also improve performance and are likelier to wrap up this year with a healthier bottom line. If you want to dive deeper into the topics of leadership and corporate culture, I encourage you to check out my books, which cover these topics in greater detail.

Bad leadership can ruin an organization. Results of sustained bad leadership include poor financial results, lack of coordination and synergy among departments or teams, low morale and motivation, and high turnover.

The effects of bad leadership ripple outward throughout an organization.

Can executive coaching turn a thoroughly incompetent leader into a good one? Probably not. In fact, there was a time in the past when executive coaching was seen as a remedial process – one that businesses employed when they perceived that they made a poor leadership choice and wanted to try to salvage the situation. But that is no longer the case.

Today, executive and leadership coaching is not remedial, nor is it designed to teach someone in a powerful position how to lead. That said, there are several common mistakes made by leaders that coaching can help turn around. Leadership that is ineffective due to factors other than incompetence can be improved significantly by coaching. Here are some examples of how that happens.

Failure to Engage

Hands-off leadership can work in certain situations. A team that operates like the proverbial well-oiled machine can go for long periods without the direct intervention of a leader. But the leader who simply doesn’t take the responsibility of leading is quite another thing. These so-called absentee leaders don’t offer feedback, don’t participate in stressful decision-making, and may be silent killers of organizations.

Executive coaching can help the hands-off leader understand the difference between trusting the team and neglecting them. A hands-off leader may be completely well-meaning, but for the style to work, he or she must understand the situations that require direct engagement and not shrug off those responsibilities.

Micromanagers

On the other hand, the micromanaging leader, though technically “engaged” with the team, can be every bit as ineffective as a hands-off leader willing to let the chips fall where they may. Leadership coaching can help the micromanaging leader understand the difference between leadership and control.

Micromanagement is highly effective at obliterating an employee’s desire to try hard.

When team members have appropriate amounts of autonomy at work, they’re likelier to innovate, to experiment and come up with creative solutions. But when a leader refuses to loosen their grip on the reins, trust cannot develop between the team and its leaders, and individuals eventually take a “why bother to try?” attitude. With leadership coaching, however, micromanagers can learn how to build that trust and allow team members the autonomy they need to excel.

Advancement at Any Cost

We like to think that leaders are, at heart, most concerned with advancing the mission of the team or organization they lead. But there are leaders who put their own advancement at the top of the priority list and allow themselves to be enamored of power and status. Can executive coaching help here?

It is definitely worth trying. A coach isn’t a therapist and does not tackle deep-seated personal issues. But coaches do offer the benefit of an objective viewpoint, and often they bring decades of experience to the table as well. Selfish behavior may work in the short term, but it can’t last indefinitely, because the business must succeed, and to do that, everyone must be on board with organizational roles. No business has time for a “leader” who doesn’t pull their weight, preferring to focus on personal success. Coaches are in a unique position to get this critical point across to egotistical clients.

Executive and leadership coaches have powerful tools at their disposal, but a magic wand they can wave to turn a bad leader into a good one is not part of the kit. However, executive coaching can identify problems, develop solutions, and help clients map out an actionable plan to get there. For the qualified leader who prioritizes organizational goals, executive coaching can help with ineffective practices like not engaging with followers or being too controlling.

Having worked with hundreds of clients in my career, I can tell you that the person who truly cannot be coached is rare. And if you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of leadership coaching, contact me today.

With the new year, new priorities tend to emerge, as leaders turn their attention to making the new calendar year outperform the departing year in every way.

A year’s worth of blank calendar pages often prompts us to make changes for the better.

Leadership and corporate culture cannot be separated, because when the two work together, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. Likewise, when leadership is separate and apart from culture, neither can be expected to excel.

Here are four key leadership coaching and culture trends for 2019 where leading companies are focusing their attention and efforts, and with good reason. Without excellence in both leadership and culture, businesses won’t reach peak performance.

1. Emphasis on Continuous Learning

“Upskilling,” “retraining,” and “professional development” are just a few of the terms that refer to continued career-related learning. And it isn’t just about learning a new programming language or software package. Continuous learning must embrace soft as well as hard skills because communication and emotional intelligence will be if anything, more important in a corporate world that embraces automation. Companies that offer learning opportunities and reward employees for using them are companies that will have better employee retention, engagement, and satisfaction.

2. Increased Focus on Quality of Culture

You may have heard the Peter Drucker quote that says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This isn’t to say that strategy isn’t important, because it is. But without an empowering culture as a foundation, strategy won’t be carried out as well as it could be. Improving the quality of culture in the workplace requires first describing the culture honestly as it is, and then planning practical and positive ways to improve it. Without the stories, organizational structures, and practices that make up a company culture, a strategy has little ground on which to gain traction.

Culture lays the groundwork for positive execution of strategy.

3. Agility in Leadership

Agility is possible in large enterprises, as long as these organizations recognize the evidence showing that smaller, multi-disciplinary teams respond more swiftly to rapidly changing conditions. But gaining agility requires more than stating the value of the agile culture. Leaders must remove the needless layers of complexity that slow progress, and they must empower employees at all levels to make informed decisions appropriate to their responsibilities. Finally, they must recognize situations where agility triumphs, to maintain momentum and avoid slipping back into less agile practices.

4. Focus on Emerging Leaders

The time to focus on emerging leaders is long before their leadership services are required. This sometimes involves working with people who may have previously been overlooked because of their background or different life experiences compared to existing leaders. Leadership development shouldn’t start when someone is promoted to a leadership position, but well before that time. Leadership succession planning is critical to every organization. Working with emerging leaders and offering leadership coaching to new leaders are two ways they can ensure the best leadership succession results.

As companies prepare for a new year, they may determine that leadership coaching plays an important role in all four of these trends. After all, leadership coaching is a form of continuous learning, it helps improve corporate culture, poises leaders for better responsiveness and agility, and helps emerging leaders become effective leaders. If you’re ready to make the coming year the best personally and professionally, contact me for more information on my executive coaching services.

Leadership styles will always be influenced by the personalities of individual leaders. There’s no way to “clone” leadership from one human to another, and thank goodness for that!

Even if we could clone outstanding leaders, it wouldn’t be smart, because leaders must be a good fit for the groups they lead – groups that are increasingly diverse.

Leadership style is important, but it’s one of many characteristics that help determine which leader is the best fit for which organization.

If you’ve been in the workforce long enough to have had multiple jobs and roles, then you’ve almost certainly encountered leaders of various types, including:

The autocrat – whose word is final and who does little if any consulting with others before making decisions

The democratic leader – who makes decisions after including team members and other trusted people in the evaluation process

The laissez-faire leader – who gives team members significant scope (sometimes too much scope) in how they do their work

The true transformational leader strives to combine the best characteristics of other leadership types. They tend to demonstrate great creativity, compassion, and a clear vision of where the organization is headed. It’s a type of leadership that makes sense for today’s business world.

The Key Characteristic That Sets Transformational Leaders Apart

Transformational leaders place great emphasis on listening. The best ones do their utmost to listen to multiple viewpoints and not just those that confirm what they were already thinking. It takes confidence and inner security to do this because true listening can ultimately result in the admission of being wrong, and many old-style leaders had a hard time with that concept.

Transformational leaders know how important listening is because they know how much followers have changed over the decades. Today’s team members are informed, curious, and diverse, and they have their own goals. Some of them are also future leaders. Listening is a way that transformational leaders ensure they are as fully informed as possible when they make key decisions.

Why Other Leadership Styles Were More Relevant in Different Eras

The autocratic leader made more sense in an era when change was slow and stability was expected. And there are times in today’s business world when the ability to make a decision on behalf of a group, with confidence and ownership, is the right thing to do.

Sure, there are times when swift, sure, final decisions must be made, but autocratic leadership can be problematic in an era of rapid change.

Likewise, the more democratic leader, who was willing to accept team consensus on some decisions made sense in times when risks were lower in business. Laissez-faire leaders may still be effective in organizations where autonomy is necessary to keep moving forward, as it is in many creative industries.

But it is the transformational leader that is best suited for a business world that moves quickly, where risks can be high, and where organizations are held accountable for the actions of individuals in them.

Leadership Coaching and Transformational Leadership

Leadership coaching doesn’t try to impose a leadership style on a client. But leadership coaches often work on skills that are essential for transformational leadership. For example, many clients work with coaches specifically on developing their listening skills, because they have been in situations where inadequate listening skills have caused problems.

Leadership coaching is also used by leaders who consider themselves to be transformational leaders because they know they have skills gaps that need to be filled. For example, a leader may be a fantastic listener but may have trouble taking the steps from listening and gathering evidence to making a decision and sticking to it.

Transformational leaders are often described as energetic, passionate, trustworthy, intelligent, and creative, and they tend to inspire these qualities in others. While there may be times when the transformational leader must act authoritatively, or step back and allow more autonomy, the difference is that they do so knowing why they’re doing it, and without giving up the great listening and data gathering skills that make them strong leaders.

We live in a world where transformation happens constantly, and leadership styles that don’t accept and work with that fact simply won’t be as effective as they were in earlier eras. If you’re interested in learning more about the transformation that’s ongoing in today’s business culture, and about the role of great leadership, I invite you to check out my books as well as my executive coaching programs.